Aiuti & Utilities

Comunity

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
Jedi apprentice Federico Biancuzzi contacted the Council and interviewed 27 Master Developers to talk about how they liberated OpenBSD 4.4 from the Empire.
The Masters discussed buffer cache improvements, the new malloc(), the work to make the math library more C99 compliant, what is new in the SCSI area, crypto support for softraid, a lot of fundamental work happened in PF, if Reyk joined the dark side, a new tool to merge configuration files during upgrades, the status of OpenCVS, some cool features of OpenSSH 5.1, the initial support for USB webcams, the never-ending work on improving and extending the sensors framework, and mooore.
May the Source be with you!

Mozilla released its latest browser, Firefox 3.0, last week. Federico Biancuzzi tracked down two key members of Mozilla's security team, Window Snyder and Johnathan Nightingale, to learn more about the security features included in this major release. They discussed the protection against phishing and the new malware protection, the new update mechanism for add-ons, Mozilla's security policies and processes, and the hardening of their Javascript implementation.

Each time a new digital rights management (DRM) system is released, hackers are not far behind in cracking it. Reverse engineers have taken down the security protecting content encoded for Windows Media, iTunes, DVDs, and HD-DVDs. SecurityFocus contributor Federico Biancuzzi tracked down Nate Lawson, the co-designer of the Blu-ray content protection system, and discusses the challenges of defending digital content, including the basic principles and mistakes of the design process, how much the hardware can help, the link between software protection and software security, and the role of security through obscurity.

The OpenBSD project announced the new release, OpenBSD 4.3, on May 1st. As usual there are a lot of improvements and new tools and features, and it sounds amazing that they keep delivering these results with a six month release cycle. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed a large group of developers to talk about the new networking tools (snmpd and snmpctl), the new features and scope of relayd (previously known as hoststated), how the configuration of carp was simplified, improvements in wireless drivers, storage limits and speed-ups, SMP support in sparc64, bug fixes and audits for some tricky coding practices, and much more!

Full disclosure has a long tradition in the security community worldwide, yet different European countries have different views on the legality of vulnerability research. SecurityFocus contributor Federico Biancuzzi investigates the subject of full disclosure and the law by interviewing lawyers from twelve EU countries: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany,Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Romania, and the UK.

It's been 10 years since the Open Source Source Initiative was launched, and what a 10 years it has been. Open Source has gone from an obscure and radical concept to a vibrant sector of the software landscape. For the 10th Anniversary, our faithful newshound Federico Biancuzzi talked to some of the early pioneers of the OSI (such as Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond) about where it came from and how it is relevant today.